Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
order white america
America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.
notebook writing letters
Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.
independent dumb secret
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. ... The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
reading literature passports
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
dream self literature
If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.
scar
whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.
vision tragedy nihilism
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.
poet units sentences
The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.
ironic collecting quotations
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism
taste juxtaposition surrealist
The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.
taste structure aesthetic
Rules of taste enforce structures of power.
identity militant
To the militant, identity is everything.
government world today
The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders.
waiting silence needs
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.